Borgenstål, Nina

Watts, Sabina

Abstract [en]

To be able to stay competitive in the global and aggressive market environment of today, organizations have to consider the importance of International human resource management (IHRM). One of the most important fields within IHRM is the management of expatriate employees. The purpose of this thesis is to gain a better understanding of how companies train their employees for international assignments. In order to reach this purpose, we investigated the objectives for training expatriates, the training of expatriates, and factors influencing expatriate. Three case studies were conducted through telephone interviews with Ericsson, Telia, and SEB. Our main findings shows that companies from different industries have the same objectives with their expatriate training and that the facilitation of the expatriates cross-cultural adjustment is one of the main objectives with the training. Furthermore we found that the training contents are generally concentrated to cultural issues and practical arrangements related to moving abroad. Finally this study revealed that companies are not aware of some of the aspects of expatriates’ training that are considered to be crucial by theorists.